6 Digital trends that will soon influence your classroom

Widespread budget cuts in educational institutions – forcing schools to do more with less in this digitally led economy – has a massive impact on the future of your role. Let’s decipher the major technologically-driven trends that can change the landscape of your classroom for the years to come.

1. Flipped Learning has been gathering some steam lately, as students now have the potential to learn and study lessons online and remotely and can then only come into the classroom to do their homework. Students will no longer have to learn first hand directly from the teacher, as various mobile apps and Wifi enabled classroom technology can create an interactive environment where students work in small groups to learn from each other. Teachers then come in to measure student involvement and responses through apps generating analytics and moderating discussions.

2.The right mobile technology, the pervasion of the Cloud, and reliable Wifi network can provide higher quality learning, as students can attend classes through video conferencing and online content promoted through social media, class forums and school portals. This enables remote learning, enabling education to become tailored to particular student needs.

3. Applying game-design thinking to classroom tasks, also known as gamification, can enable more fun and engagement. Providing challenges, whilst rewarding winners and in turn giving harder challenges to overcome can lead to a greater emotional connection to the learning material. This will also enable a ‘fail fast’ approach that encourages improvements and embraces failure as part of the natural learning process – which is commonplace in ever increasing entrepreneurial workplace cultures.

4.The one time sunk cost of providing tablets or if your school follows the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) principle will change the way students relate to expensive textbooks. Digital textbooks are all the rage as they are more cost-efficient, easily updatable and accessible.

5.Big-Data has everyone talking and it’s easy to know why: with all the mobile devices, applications and wireless technologies we use day in and out, a massive influx of data can be harnessed and used to change how we teach and what we learn. You’ll have the ability to know with precision what works for your students in terms of lesson plans, homework and where they fall on the success spectrum of attainment.

6. With the right strategy and wireless infrastructure, social media is a powerful leverage, transforming the learning experience and relations between students and you. Facebook groups can bring students together for collaborative projects and assignments and Twitter can give way to interactive conversations on a specific subject relating to a hashtag. This can provide a way to also cement the digital citizenship code into your student’s way of handling technology.

With all this being said, what does this mean for you as a teacher? Tim Bush, Microsoft’s UK Education Marketing Manager, believes that teachers will act more as guides or curators of educational learning materials by enabling students to become more emotionally connected and physically engaged with what they are learning.

Click here to find some classroom tools that can help you prepare for some of the above!